Approximately 25 percent of all ransomware attacks and extortion incidents happen in manufacturing, and ransomware drives 61 percent of manufacturing malware-related breaches, according to Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report.
It’s not if your manufacturing enterprise will be hit by a ransomware attack, but when and how often. And, with AI-driven cyberattacks, some breaches are being executed in as little as 25 minutes. Therefore, it is critical for you to deploy a cyber-centric, recovery-first strategy to protect your manufacturing operations.
The Scope of the Threat
Attacks targeting manufacturing have the potential to cripple production lines, disrupt revenue, and undermine overall market confidence, ultimately threatening economic stability. For example, a successful ransomware attack on the enterprise storage systems of a manufacturing company can have severe and far-reaching consequences.
The immediate impact is often a complete halt in production processes, as critical data and files become encrypted and inaccessible. The attack can compromise various aspects of the manufacturing operations, from design and engineering data to supply chain to management information and more.
Ransomware actors increasingly view manufacturing not just as a means to ransom data, but also as a path to gain leverage over an enterprise, knowing that even a short shutdown can ripple through entire industries and economies. Disruptions that are due to ransomware, or other cyberattacks, can have international-level consequences, undermining essential operations, eroding public trust, and having serious financial impacts on the business.
The rise of AI-driven cyber threats has made it worse, getting to the point where it is reshaping the threat landscape. Attacks based on AI that took nine days in 2021 are now being completed in under 30 minutes, according to the Global Threat Report 2026 by CrowdStrike. It’s remarkable how ransomware execution has been accelerated 100 times over the last five years.
Furthermore, according to an MIT Sloan study, AI is now being utilized in over 80 percent of ransomware attacks, and manufacturing enterprises are struggling to match the speed and sophistication of AI-powered threats.
AI is being used to automate and scale data extortion operations, unleashing multi-extortion campaigns against enterprises. An AI model can be used locally to generate malicious scripts, as well as determine autonomously whether to encrypt data or exfiltrate. An AI model is capable of making its own determination during infection as to what files to search, replicate, or encrypt. When an enterprise storage infrastructure does not have cyber storage resilience built into it, the entire data infrastructure is vulnerable.
With ransomware actors in 2026 favoring tactics that prioritize speed, stealth, and high-leverage data extortion over simple encryption, the question at hand is: What can be done?
Focusing on Storage Infrastructure
Manufacturing enterprises are now gaining an advantage over ransomware attacks by incorporating cyber storage resilience and cyber recovery into a comprehensive corporate cybersecurity strategy. Cyber storage resilience is the ability of an enterprise's data infrastructure to withstand and recover quickly from a cyberattack.
A proactive, multilayer approach and recovery strategy to combat AI-driven ransomware is needed. Cyber storage resilience implements a proactive defense mechanism, shifting away from a passive approach to data repositories with cyber storage technology embedded in the storage systems.
Cyber storage resilience utilizes advanced features, including data immutability, logical/remote air-gapping, AI-powered cyber detection, fenced forensic environment, and automated cyber protection – all to enable a near-instantaneous recovery of a known good copy of data in the aftermath of a ransomware attack.
It starts with your enterprise storage infrastructure that stores data, the most valuable asset of your business. Your enterprise storage infrastructure must be cyber secure. By making its storage infrastructure cyber secure, a manufacturer is protecting its software supply chain with all the data that is critical to the business.
As you develop your cyber-centric, recovery-first IT strategy, you should select a cyber storage resilience stack that delivers next-generation data protection capabilities. They should be able to detect and isolate data corruption more quickly with AI-powered cyber detection built into the primary storage platform, use alerts from a security operations center (SOC) or data center-wide cybersecurity software (SIEM and SOAR applications) to automatically trigger snapshots of data, and recover in minutes or even seconds.
Cyber storage resilience technology is an IT investment to help reduce the threat window and help you manage “cyber risk” more effectively. According to PwC’s 2026 Global Digital Trust Insights survey, 60 percent of business and tech leaders rank cyber risk investment in their top three strategic priorities.
AI is clearly being used by bad actors for nefarious purposes, as AI itself has become “a super-intelligent cybercriminal.” However, AI is also being used for good, such as combatting AI-driven ransomware.
The use of AI/ML in cyber storage resilience, especially cyber detection built into an enterprise storage platform, gives you a powerful tool to mitigate the impact of ransomware attacks. At the end of the day, you won’t even have to pay any “ransom” to get your data back. Supercharged by autonomous automation, a true cyber resilient storage solution will recover a known good copy of data for you.
Although the amount of ransomware attacks has increased overall, fewer enterprises are paying the ransom that cybercriminals demand after they take data hostage through a ransomware attack. Ransom payment rates have declined to around 25 percent, which means roughly only one organization out of four is actually paying the ransom (Sophos). This historic low of ransom payment rates points to the fact that cyber storage resilience and recovery is working.
Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat, a Lenovo company.
